During Billy Graham’s
historic 1949 Los Angeles evangelistic campaign, a big tent that held over
6,000 people was filled to overflowing every night for 8 weeks. Hundreds of
people came to Christ during those meetings including high-prolife celebrities
like radio personality Stuart Hamblin, Olympic runner and WWII vet Louis
Zamperini and former gangster Jim Vaus.
Close by the big tent was
a smaller tent set aside for counseling and prayer. Cliff Barrows, longtime
music director and close friend and associate of Graham, has often said that
the real work of the gospel took place in “the little tent,” where people
gathered on their knees to pray before and during every evangelistic service. A
local Los Angeles woman, Pearl Goode, was instrumental in organizing those
prayer meetings and many that followed.[1]
Will Graham, the grandson of
Billy, wrote about Pearl Goode’s ministry like this, “In the annals of world
history, you won’t find many mentions of a lady named Pearl Goode. She never
ran for political office, never commanded troops, and never served as the CEO
of a Fortune-500 company. Pearl became a prayer warrior for the crusades, at
first without anybody on my grandfather’s team even knowing. She would spend
her own money to travel by Greyhound bus to wherever they were holding an
event, quietly check herself into a motel near the venue, and immediately begin
praying. Pearl estimated that she covered 48,000 miles by bus, simply to pray
for the Crusades. Even later in life when Pearl could no longer travel, or when
my grandfather was preaching overseas, she would make it a point to know
exactly when he would be preaching, and she would spend those exact hours in
prayer. In an address he gave in 1994, my grandfather said, ‘She prayed all
night many nights, and I could sense the presence and power of that prayer.
When she died, I felt it.’”[2]
Pearl Goode
In the apostle Paul’s
letter to the Colossians, he assured them that he and his colleagues were
praying always for them, “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, when we pray for you” (Col.
1:3). In closing Paul mentioned Epaphras, a founder of the Colossian church,
who is “always laboring fervently for you
in prayers, that you may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God”
(Col. 4:12).
Some people are given the
high visibility task of preaching the gospel in “the big tent.” But God has
extended to us all, just as He did to Epaphras and Pearl Goode, the great
privilege of kneeling in “the little tent” and bringing others before the
throne of God. We get to be intercessors for the lost and those Christian
soldiers on the frontlines, and what we do in prayer may help turn the tide in
our spiritual battle for souls.
In one of his books, Charles
Spurgeon, spoke about “a certain preacher whose sermons converted men by the
scores.” Later, this preacher believed that he received a revelation from God
in a dream, “that not one of the conversions was owing to his talents and eloquence,
but all the prayers of illiterate lay brother, who sat on the pulpit steps,
pleading all the time for the success of the sermon.” Spurgeon continued, “It
may in the judgment be so with us. We may discover, after having labored long
and wearily in preaching, that all the honor belongs to another builder, who
prayers were gold, silver and precious stones, while our sermons being deficient
of prayer, were but wood, hay and stubble.”[3]
-DM
[1]
David C. McCasland, “The Little Tent,” Our
Daily Bread, 16 January 2014 <https://odb.org/2014/01/16/the-little-tent/>
[2]
Will Graham, “Will Graham on Pearl Goode and the Power of Prayer,” Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
5 May 2016 <https://billygraham.org/story/will-graham-on-pearl-goode-and-the-power-of-prayer/>
[3] Charles
Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students (Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson, 2016 ed.), 48.
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